Monument Film / Adebar / Schwechater

**Before:**

**Adebar**, directed by Peter Kubelka. AT, 1957, 35mm, B&W, 1 min
**Schwechater**, directed by Peter Kubelka. AT, 1958, 35mm, Color, 1 min

This year, Peter Kubelka celebrated his 90th birthday, and the Film Museum marked its 60th anniversary. To commemorate these milestones, Kubelka once again presents his *Monument Film*. In 1960, with *Arnulf Rainer*, Kubelka explored four fundamental elements of cinema—light, darkness, sound, and silence—using a radical score of 9,216 film frames. Fifty-two years later, he created *Antiphon* as a direct response: a precise inversion where white becomes black, sound turns to silence, and vice versa. Together, these films form *Monument Film*. Two 35mm projectors are set up in the theater: *Arnulf Rainer* is screened first, followed by *Antiphon*, and then both films are shown side-by-side and finally overlaid on top of each other.

Peter Kubelka stated in *Film Comment*: "2012 is film history’s darkest year. The hostile takeover by digital imagery is finally complete. Even though everybody knows how short-lived digital archiving is. But short-term profit is more important. The industry wants to kill off the old medium, by any means. I see my *Monument Film* as a call for patient defiance."